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Perfection is the satin-lined casket of creativity and originality. If you are a perfectionist, at least stop telling everybody you're one and try to get over it yourself, alone in your home with the lights off

Augusten Burroughs

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Augusten Burroughs
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: October 23
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Creativity
Caskets
Least
Satin
Stop
Lined
Everybody
Perfectionist
Alone
Originality
Light
Lights
Home
Perfection
Trying
Telling
Casket

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Red hair is great. It's rare, and therefore superior.
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I'm grateful for a lot of things. One is not being a drunk wreck. Or losing all four limbs in some ridiculous East Village bus accident that I was so destined for.
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Stars should not be seen alone. That's why there are so many. Two people should stand together and look at them. One person alone will surely miss the good ones.
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I was on the cover of a lot of newspapers. I was on the cover of USA Today for every single day for a month. I was on the masthead, so I tend to get recognized a lot, and in weird places. It's always flattering, and it's always odd. It's always at the worst possible time.
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Although I was able to maintain a pleasant expression, I was mentally throwing up in her face.
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This is what you should know about losing someone you love. They do not travel alone. You go with them.
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This is how you survive the unsurvivable, this is how you lose that which you cannot bear to lose, this is how you reinvent yourself, overcome your abusers, fulfill your ambitions and meet the love of your life: by following what is true, no matter where it leads you.
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You would be amazed by what you can give up, lose, or break, and yet still be a person who gets happy over brownies.
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I'm always prepared for the worst.
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Once I decided to write, to be published, I knew it would happen.
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Throwing things horrified me. I suffered extreme, paralyzing anxiety when it came to anything remotely athletic. I wouldn't even run to catch the school bus because I knew I'd trip and then get teased for a year.
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Real optimism is not the pep talk you give yourself. It is earned through the labor involved in emotional housekeeping.
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I knew that if I wrote a new book every six months or every year, if I continued to read great books, eventually I would write something worthy of publication. I understood I might be in my forties or my fifties or even my sixties, but I felt confident that it would happen.
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The problem with not having anybody to tell you what to do, I understood, is that there was nobody to tell you what not to do.
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Long marriages have ended in ruin over tiny and insignificant grievances that were never properly aired and instead grew into a brittle barnacle of hatred.
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You can make almost anything a learning or positive experience. I think I offer a good example of how to make the most out of what life gives you and how to keep moving on.
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I think I love him, but I also think that you can love people who aren't good for you.
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As a young child I had Santa and Jesus all mixed up. I could identify Coke or Pepsi with just one sip, but I could not tell you for sure why they strapped Santa to a cross. Had he missed a house? Had a good little girl somewhere in the world not received the doll he'd promised her, making the father angry?
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We haven't slept together. But we've napped
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Confidence is a reduction of your own interest in whether others are thinking about you and if so, what they're thinking.
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